The Average American Today Is Richer than John D. Rockefeller

The Average American Today Is Richer than John D. Rockefeller | Intellectual Takeout:
"This Atlantic story reveals how Americans lived 100 years ago.
By the standards of a middle-class American today, that lifestyle was poor, inconvenient, dreary, and dangerous.
(Only a few years later — in 1924 — the 16-year-old son of a sitting US president would die of an infected blister that the boy got on his toe while playing tennis on the White House grounds.)
So here’s a question that I’ve asked in one form or another on earlier occasions, but that is so probing that I ask it again:
What is the minimum amount of money that you would demand in exchange for your going back to live even as John D. Rockefeller lived in 1916?
21.7 million 2016 dollars (which are about one million 1916 dollars)?
Would that do it?
What about a billion 2016 — or 1916 — dollars?
Would this sizable sum of dollars be enough to enable you to purchase a quantity of high-quality 1916 goods and services that would at least make you indifferent between living in 1916 America and living (on your current income) in 2016 America?
Think about it.
Hard.
Carefully.
If you were a 1916 American billionaire you could, of course, afford prime real-estate. 
You could afford a home on 5th Avenue or one overlooking the Pacific Ocean or one on your own tropical island somewhere (or all three).
...In the winter, many were also poorly heated by today’s standards.
To travel to Europe took you several days.
To get to foreign lands beyond Europe took you even longer.
Might you want to deliver a package or letter overnight from New York City to someone in Los Angeles?
Sorry.
Impossible.
You could neither listen to radio (the first commercial radio broadcast occurred in 1920) nor watch television.
You could, however, afford the state-of-the-art phonograph of the era. 
(It wasn’t stereo, though. And — I feel certain — even today’s vinylphiles would prefer listening to music played off of a modern compact disc to listening to music played off of a 1916 phonograph record.)
Obviously, you could not download music.
There really wasn’t very much in the way of movies for you to watch, even though you could afford to build your own home movie theater..."